Pros

Potential for great camera add-ons.

Huge battery.

Cons

Huge.

Heavy.

Expensive.

3D is not holographic and doesn't look particularly good.

We don't often see artisanal smartphones. But the RED Hydrogen One ($1,295 in aluminum, $1,595 in titanium) is very clearly the vision of one man, company founder Jim Jannard. Red created the first mainstream 4K digital video camera, the Red One, and has since moved to 8K with its Weapon line. Coming from nowhere 19 years ago, it's a major Hollywood name today. It has now built a giant, heavy smartphone with a massive battery, scalloped grips, and a modular expansion connector for professional video camera attachments. So far, so good.

After almost two months on the market, I'm revisiting my original look at the phone to give it a proper rating. While frequent software updates (with more to come) have added features, fixed bugs, and sanded away the edges, it costs and weighs too much for what you're getting, and in my opinion, its glasses-free 3D system is an inherently bad idea that should have been left in the past.

If and when the promised RED camera modules come out, this phone could find a unique place as a professional camera control system. But right now, the Google Pixel and Apple iPhone lines offer better built-in cameras, unless you want 3D, which you really don't.

Physical Form

The RED Hydrogen One is a ridiculous beast—the largest, heaviest phone I've seen this year. Carry it around for a while and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 will feel as flimsy as a piece of paper. It measures 6.5 by 3.4 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs a shocking 9.3 ounces. (I generally consider a one-handed phone to be anything under 2.8 inches wide.) It's not pocketable, and you'll need a big hand to hold it; when I gave it to a woman with smaller hands, she said she had trouble using it. It's a good thing the phone has those scalloped finger grips built into the sides.

Samsung Galaxy S9+

LG V40 ThinQ

Google Pixel 3

On the edges of the phone, there's a power button/fingerprint sensor, volume buttons, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, and a dedicated camera button. The 5.7-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 LTPS LCD is on the front, of course; it's big and bright, but without the poppy colors we expect from some other phones' OLED screens. It's flanked by two gigantic front-facing speakers. On the metal ridged back, you find a camera disk, a big RED logo, and magnetic pogo pins to attach future accessories.

RED says the phone is rugged, made of aluminum and Kevlar, but declines to give any specific IP or MIL-SPEC ratings for it; that might be because of the cost of certification, or because the Gorilla Glass 3 screen seems as breakable as any other.

Carrying the phone around is unwieldy. It sits in my pocket like a large stone; I'd lift it out with a sigh, maneuvering my hands around it to turn the camera on. There's nothing quick or simple about it, the way whipping out a Pixel 3, Galaxy S9, or iPhone XS is.

Processor and Performance

In one of its most perplexing moves, the Hydrogen One uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor from 2017 as opposed to the current 845 model. That's especially frustrating because the 845's improved GPU could have fixed some issues with 3D gaming, and the 845's multi-frame noise reduction would definitely have made a difference with low-light camera performance.

Benchmarking the phone resulted in numbers that look more like a midrange than a high-end device. We got 5033 on PCMark, 6654 on Geekbench multi-core, 167.67 on Basemark Web, and 12fps on the GFXBench car chase onscreen benchmark. That's similar to the LG V30 from last year, and well behind the Galaxy S9, LG G7, Galaxy Note 9, and either the Google Pixel 2 or 3 on overall benchmarks. The Pixel 3 XL and Razer Phone 2 both push double that frame rate on the graphics benchmark, which is deeply concerning in a phone so focused on visual output and camera input.

Before you complain that benchmarks are synthetic, these results back up a lot of the other frustrations I have with the phone, whether they be HDR camera issues or gaming frame rates.

The phone comes in AT&T and Verizon; we tested the AT&T model. It has a great array of LTE bands, covering everything that AT&T and Verizon support, as well as 2G and 3G GSM and CDMA. (It doesn't have T-Mobile's band 71, but it isn't available for T-Mobile.)

Call quality is excellent—the earpiece gets very loud without distortion, and the front-facing speakerphone gives you a direct, unmuffled sound. Signal reception on AT&T's network was unremarkable in testing. Other wireless standards here include dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0.

Playing music, the phone's front-facing speakers sound vigorously loud and don't distort, but are still as tinny as an Amazon Echo Dot. With headphones plugged in, though, the sound is excellent—rich, loud, and deep.

The phone we tested has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, of which 101GB is free, along with a microSD card slot. The $1,595 Titanium version has 256GB of storage. It runs Android 8.1 rather than the newer Android 9.0 because all of RED's proprietary 3D technology takes a lot of work to program, and 9.0 wasn't available at the time it was built. An Android 9.0 update will come during the first quarter of 2019, RED says.

There are some RED proprietary apps to showcase 3D content, as well as some AT&T bloatware. Leia Loft is RED's tiny app store for 3D apps, the Hydrogen Network is where you get 3D content, and the RED Player is a gallery app that can show 3D.

AT&T's special sauce here is the fact that it owns Warner Media, and can transform its 3D Hollywood films into 3D content for the phone. If you buy the phone from AT&T, you get downloads of Fantastic Beasts and Ready Player One in 3D for free.

We got 7 hours, 59 minutes of video streaming over Wi-Fi on the gigantic 4,500mAh battery. That's much less than we expected (and far less than the 12-plus hours we got on the Samsung Galaxy Note 9), possibly because of the battery requirements of the 3D screen.

Not a $1,300 Camera

The phone has dual 12-megapixel cameras on the back and dual 8-megapixel cameras on the front. It can capture 4K video at 30 frames per second, a limit of the 835 processor; other high-end phones can capture at 60fps. The phone's 2D images are 4,056 by 3,040, while 3D images are 3,840 by 2,160.

The camera is where I see the biggest improvements in the two months since the phone launched. RED has improved focus and added manual modes for both the 2D and 3D cameras, giving you much better control over your photos. The software updates also fix the focus issues I initially saw.

In good, outdoor light, the Hydrogen One's 2D mode delivers images that are similar in quality to the Google Pixel 3, which is great. It still falls short in low light, when dealing with backlit scenes, and with indoor shots of faces.

Here's the Pixel 3 (left) and the Hydrogen One (right) in good light. Click for a larger version.

Compared with the Pixel 3, portraits of both dark and light-skinned people look smoothed out and spackled, where the Pixel's shots look more precise. Backlighting more frequently results in lens flare on the Hydrogen than on the Pixel.

In low light, where the Pixel really excels, the Hydrogen's shots are less precise than the Pixel's outdoors, and noisier indoors.

Here we have the Pixel 3 (left) and Hydrogen One (right) at night, outdoors. Click to see the difference on the larger image.

You have a lot of video resolution and frame rate options now. Both the front and rear cameras go up to 4K, with 24, 25 and 30fps options (and 60, but not in 4K.) You can encode in H.264 or H.265 at data rates of 42Mbps or 100Mbps. And both the front and rear cameras capture 3D.

The software updates improve and stabilize the 3D recording experience, although once again, you don't want to try that in low light. The big star here, actually, is recording in 3D with the front-facing camera, which gives you a great depth effect. Unfortunately, as with all the other 3D features here, you can only see the results on another RED Hydrogen phone, which really reduces the feature's value.

Betting on the Wrong 3D Horse

Without the camera modules available, RED seems to have doubled down on its 3D—oh, sorry, "4-view"—screen as a sales point. But once I got out of RED's reality distortion field, I found 4-view to be just as frustrating and disappointing as the last round of failed 3D phones.

I'm going to rag on this especially hard because of all the overpromising RED is doing. The company says this is "holographic," which is completely false. It uses two traditional lenses and combines parallax views just like every other consumer 3D product ever. There is nothing holographic about this—no lasers, no 180-plus-degree viewing angle, no perspective that shifts naturally as you move around an object.

On a more visceral level, holographic images and movie-theater 3D films appear to pop out of a display, while lenticular images appear to fall into it. Lenticular images look like dioramas. This phone's screen looks like a diorama. It isn't "coming at ya," as they used to say about old 3D movies.

4-view, like previous glasses-free 3D screens, uses a filter to direct light to each of your eyes, fooling them into thinking a 2D image is 3D. RED says its filter is better than previous generations, and that it's using four images rather than two, making for a more realistic picture with better camera angles.

While 4-view definitely has better viewing angles than, say, the HTC EVO 3D did, it still has the fuzzy, shifting quality of lenticular 3D. RED says this is a 3D you can look at for long periods of time without tiring out your eyes, but I find it considerably more dizzying and nausea-inducing than a good VR headset, especially in a fast-moving game like Asphalt 8.

Low resolution certainly has something to do with it. In 4-view mode, the 2,560-by-1,440 screen effectively becomes 640 by 360, as it needs to divide itself into four. Capturing images in 4-view reduces their resolution, to 8 megapixels as a standard JPEG or 960-by-540-by-4 as a 3D image. The images also appear very dark on the screen. As there is no other device in the world I can view them on, I can't tell whether that's a problem with capture or display.

The phone suffers, very badly, from the proprietary format problem. Once you've recorded your 3D photos, you'll only be able to view them on another $1,300 RED phone. (They appear as 2D JPEGs to anyone else.) 3D videos are in a unique H4V video format that no one else has ever used.

After two months, there are a dozen or so 3D movies available, including big films like Wonder Woman and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The films have to be purchased, not rented, and generally cost around $30 each (and you can only watch them on this phone). I watched chunks of Wonder Woman, The Avengers,and Ready Player One, and while they're good transfers, I don't feel like the generally subtle 3D effects are adding enough to the experience to justify the cost.

Software updates have helped the 3D games' performance problems, but they haven't helped availability. The endless-runner Paddington Run 4V no longer drops frames badly. Asphalt 8 performs better than it did, but there are still dizzying parallax issues with some of the 3D scenes. More importantly, there were 11 games at launch; now there are only 14. I've seen this problem time and time again with innovative phones that just don't have a big enough market to be a good target for game developers.

The Future Isn't Here Yet

I see a vision in this phone. It's the vision of a go-anywhere, pro-quality connected movie camera that effortlessly captures massive files and uploads them easily, probably using 5G. I know RED's Jim Jannard shares this idea, because at the phone's launch he said that he wants his phone to be used as a second-unit camera on shoots.

But as RED rafted down the rapids towards 5G, it got caught in a weird eddy of 3D. Much of the power and expense in this phone seems dedicated to maintaining an exclusive little universe of 3D content. But it's not that impressive, and I don't think 3D is coming back. RED would do better to focus on broader, more mainstream standards.

The back of the Hydrogen One says "media machine." As we use more 4K TVs and 8K displays—don't think home TVs, but think projectors and billboards and industrial signage—we're going to need more super high-resolution, super high-quality content, and those huge file sizes will drive 5G adoption. That content is going to need to be stable, bright, and in an 8K industry standard format, not in some proprietary 3D format.

The pogo pins on the back of this phone speak to this idea, but the idea hasn't been realized yet. You should hold off on buying any RED phones until it has been. For now, the iPhone XS has the best moviemaking software, and the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are the Android camera phones to beat.

About Sascha Segan

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed more than 1,100 smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 15 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks projects in the US and Canada, runs our Race to 5G tracker, and writes opinions on tech and society. Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite cities are Barcelona and Hong Kong. While he's a fourth-generation Manhattanite, he now lives in Queens with his wife and daughter.

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